On his third carry early in the second quarter of last night’s loss to Broncos, Ware gained eight yards — and then had the ball knocked out of his hands by Mario Haggan, and Brian Dawkins recovered.

“They went low, I came up off my feet . . . stripped it when I was in the air,” Ware said. “Bad play. . . . It’ll never happen again, but . . . it happened.”

Ware did rebound with a 14-yard romp in the third quarter before Champ Bailey knocked him out of the game after his reception in the right flat with a concussion.

“I’m OK,” Ware said. “I just had my bell rung a little bit.”

Ware, who had chipped off the rust with two carries in each of the past two games, had earned the trust of coach Tom Coughlin and quarterback Eli Manning with his blitz pickups against the Falcons, and the Giants were hoping he could bring a badly-needed dimension to Manning out of the backfield.

“Very, very good football player,” defensive end Osi Umenyiora said. “We see him in practice, we’re like, ‘Man, we really like the way this guy runs.’ ”

Asked what the 225-pound Ware brings to the table, Umenyiora said: “I think he’s a faster Derrick Ward. Obviously we all know what Derrick Ward was able to do here, and I think he can do the same thing.”

He’s got good hands?

“Yeah, he could do it all, man, good blocker and all that,” Umenyiora said.

Ward, in addition to rushing for 1,025 yards in his role as Wind to Jacobs’ Earth, caught 41 passes for 384 yards. Jacobs, an afterthought in the passing game because of suspect hands, has caught 10 passes for 96 yards. Bradshaw has caught 12 passes for 69 yards.

“He has a Derrick style of running, it’s similar,” Manning said of Ware, who has let it be known that he now wants to be called DJ. “And good out of the backfield catching the ball. So whatever role it is, he should be able to fill it and play well.”

Back in October, Ware blogged on his Web site: “Dislocating my elbow on the first play of the first game of the season and missing four games was terrible, terrible, terrible. But I think everything happens for a reason. I think it just wasn’t my time to explode onto the scene.”

Earlier this month Ware blogged:

“I don’t know how much I’m going to play against the Chargers, but I can tell you I’ll be standing right there by the coaches, ready to go, giving them the eye until they put me in there. If they let me play, there’s going to be some fireworks.”